NVIDIA Allegedly Launching Quadro K6000 GK110 GPU For Professionals

Earlier this week, NVIDIA updated its Quadro line of workstation cards with new GPUs with GK104 “Kepler” cores. The updated line introduced four new Kepler cards, but the Quadro 6000 successor was notably absent from the NVIDIA announcement. If rumors hold true, professionals may get access to a K6000 Quadro card after all, and one that is powered by GK110 as well.

According to rumors around the Internet, NVIDIA has reserved its top-end Quadro slot for a GK110-based graphics card. Dubbed the K6000 (and in line with the existing Kepler Quadro cards), the high-end workstation card will feature 13 SMX units, 2,496 CUDA cores, 192 Texture Manipulation Units, 40 Raster Operations Pipeline units, and a 320-bit memory bus. The K6000 card will likely have 5GB of GDDR5 memory, like its Tesla K20 counterpart. Interestingly, this Quadro K6000 graphics card has one less SMX unit than NVIDIA’s Tesla K20X and even NVIDIA’s consumer-grade GTX Titan GPU. A comparison between the rumored K6000 card, the Quadro K5000 (GK104), and other existing GK110 cards is available in the table below. Also, note that the (rumored) K6000 specs put it more in like with the Tesla K20 than the K20X, but as it is the flagship Quadro card I felt it was still fair to compare it to the flagship Telsa and GeForce cards.

Quadro K6000

Tesla K20X

GTX Titan

GK110 Full (Not available yet)

Quadro K5000

SMX Units

13

14

14

15

8

CUDA Cores

2,496

2,688

2,688

2,880

1536

TMUs

192

224

224

256

128

ROPs

40

48

48

48

32

Memory Bus

320-bit

384-bit

384-bit

384-bit

256-bit

DP TFLOPS

~1.17 TFLOPS

1.31 TFLOPS

1.31 TFLOPS

~1.4 TFLOPS

.09 TFLOPS

Core

GK110

GK110

GK110

GK110

GK104

The Quadro cards are in an odd situation when it comes to double precision floating point performance. The Quadro K5000 which uses GK104 brings an abysmal 90 GFLOPS of double precision. The rumored GK110-powered Quadro K6000 brings double precision performance up to approximately 1 TFLOPS, which is quite the jump and shows that GK104 really was cut down to focus on gaming performance! Further, the card that the K6000 is replacing in name, the Quadro 6000 (no prefixed K), is based on NVIDIA’s previous-generation Fermi architecture and offers .5152 TFLOPS (515.2 GFLOPS) of double precision performance. On the plus side, users can expect around 3.5 TFLOPS of single precision horsepower, which is a substantial upgrade over Quadro 6000's 1.03 TFLOPS of single precision floating point. For comparison, the GK104-based Quadro K5000 offers 2.1 TFLOPS of single precision. Although it's no full GK110, it looks to be the Quadro card to beat for the intended usage.

Of course, Quadro is more about stable drivers, beefy memory, and single precision than double precision, but it would be nice to see the expensive Quadro workstation cards have the ability to pull double duty, as it were. NVIDIA’s Tesla line is where DP floating point is key. It is just a rather wide gap between the two lineups that the K6000 somewhat closes, fortunately. I would have really liked to see the K6000 have at least 14 SMX units, to match consumer Titan and the Tesla K20X, but rumors are not looking positive in that regard. Professionals should expect to see quite the premium with the K6000 versus the Titan, despite the hardware differences. It will likely be sold for around $3,000.

No word on availability, but the card will likely be released soon in order to complete the Kepler Quadro lineup update.

The Quadro K6000 will be little more than a Tesla K20 with display outputs, just as the GeForce GTX Titan is a Tesla K20X with display outputs. For true professionals, even with the lower SMX unit and CUDA core counts, the drivers alone will make the card more useful than a GeForce GTX Titan. The thing I'm concerned about is the memory. Not necessarily the 320-bit bus, which is smaller than the 384-bit bus on the Quadro 6000 and GeForce GTX Titan, but the fact that I'll have one less gigabyte. I have a Quadro 6000 card now, and I'm maxing the 6GB of memory it has. I think Nvidia is planning on the card to be much more efficient in processing what's in its memory, though, so I'm not too worried.